Yaani

» see yaani.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Yaani was aimed directly at people like me and it did not move me an inch. i had been typing turkish into a search box since the dial-up years, back when the letters with dots and tails came out the other side as somebody else's problem. By 2017 that habit was nineteen years old. A new box asking to replace it needed an argument better than a flag.

Turkcell announced it on 25 october 2017. Kaan Terzioğlu was running the company then and he gave it the framing everyone repeated afterward: this is not turkcell's search engine, it is turkey's search engine. The slogan worked the same seam, everybody else's engine searches and yaani finds.

The product underneath was a search page and a mobile browser, with a free mail service called YaaniMail attached to it and two gigabytes of storage per account. Queries were meant to be parsed with turkish grammar in mind rather than run through an english-shaped pipeline. The data would sit in the new turkcell data center at Gebze, which was the part the announcement kept coming back to.

That was the whole pitch, and it was a real pitch. A country of eighty five million typing its questions into a machine in california is a genuine dependency, and pointing at it is not silly. The trouble was never the argument. The trouble was that the thing built to answer the argument had nothing behind its search box.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was under it ~

Building a search engine means crawling most of the reachable web and keeping a copy of it. Then it means being right about which twelve of the ten thousand matching pages a person actually wanted. The crawling and the storing cost money. The ranking is the part nobody has ever cheaply copied. Yaani launched with none of it. The engine sat on infrastructure licensed from Ntent, an american search technology firm, and the actual results came in from elsewhere.

The people behind Geliyoo, an earlier and much-mocked attempt at a domestic search engine, said publicly that yaani was serving Yandex and Google data. Turkcell's answer was that it received technological support from certain companies, without naming them. That answer is the whole story compressed into one sentence. A national search engine that will not tell you whose index it is reading from has already conceded the only point it was launched to make.

~ the numbers it did put up ~

Not nothing, to be fair about it. Over five million installs across the android and ios stores, with a huawei build after google left that platform, and more than a hundred and twenty five million searches run through it across its life. There were desktop builds for windows and mac. It was wired into the rest of the turkcell stack, BiP and Lifebox among them, so a turkcell subscriber could end up inside it without going looking.

A hundred and twenty five million searches sounds enormous until you set it against five years and a subscriber base in the tens of millions. Google does that volume in under an hour. The gap between those two numbers is the reason the thing was closable without anybody outside the company noticing much.

~ how it actually ended ~

The app got its last update on 3 november 2022. Five days later, on 8 november, the search service was ended and the address started sending people to turkcell's own site. The app hung around for a while after that as a plain browser pointed at other companies' engines, which is a strange thing to keep shipping when the entire reason for its existence had been switched off.

Then it went too. Today yaani.com does not resolve, yaani.com.tr does not resolve, and the app is on neither store. There is no farewell page and no archive of what it indexed, because there was never an index to archive. Turkey's search engine is now a wikipedia article and a run of press releases from october 2017, all of them still confident.

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